Good detective work involves a variety of factors - including, occasionally luck - but one attitude that can lead to disaster all too easily is complacency. Two of Scotland Yard's finest investigators, working on quite separate cases, were about to learn that lesson the hard way. Each detective thought he knew all the details of his own case. Each thought he knew the nature of the crime, the identity of the victim, and - most important, perhaps -the identity of the killer, still on the run from justice. Each thought it was just a matter of time before standard police routine turned up the missing criminal and delivered the killer to the police. Each thought an arrest was imminent.
Each was wrong.
And it wasn't until they laid out the facts of their cases before Dr. Lancelot Priestley that Dr. Priestley was able to get them on the right track - a path which turned out to have some major surprises for all concerned. The story is told in John Rhode's clever Golden Age mystery called Body Unidentified, first published in 1937. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
Superintendent Hanslet of the Yard is working on a case involving the theft of a fortune in diamonds. His subordinate, Inspector Jimmy Waghorn is working on a murder - a rather gruesome one involving a body found in a pot of boiling road tar, making identification impossible. However, as Hanslet tells his friend, Dr. Priestley, Jimmy knows who committed the murder, the motive - robbery - and the murderer (and, by elimination, the identity of that unidentified body mentioned in the title). It's just a matter of time before the police catch the killer, who is currently on the run. As for Hanslet, he is working on the theft of the fabulous Wherwell diamonds, a case also involving a murder. He is quite confident that – like Jimmy – he too is bound to catch his killer before very long.
Stop snickering, experienced reader! Both detectives are in for a series of pretty rude shocks – and Dr. Priestley will have to step in to redirect their investigation. To do this, Dr. Priestley relies primarily on timetables drawn up by the investigators - schedules which show the times of key events and the movements of the major players in the drama. It was a method of detection quite popular among some Golden Age authors – most particularly Freeman Wills Crofts, who used such timetables to great effect in many of his books. John Rhode uses the same devices in this book for Dr. Priestley, and it does, on occasion, make the book seem rather slow. But the plot, when ultimately revealed, really is remarkably clever. Readers – who are likely to be a step ahead of the police investigators in reaching some conclusions – will have every right to feel proud of their sleuthing.
John Rhode's books are relatively hard to find - not very many have been reprinted. NightHawk Books has been offering e-book versions of some of the Rhodes books, including Body Unidentified, and I think you would enjoy this one.
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